Linda Ham (née Hautzinger) is a former Constellation Program Transition and Technology Infusion Manager at NASA. She was formerly the program integration manager in the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Space Shuttle Program Office and acting manager for launch integration. In this position, she chaired the mission management team for all shuttle flights between 2001 and 2003, including shuttle mission STS-107 that ended with the catastrophic destruction of Columbia upon its planned reentry into the Earth's atmosphere. Ham's actions and decisions, along with those of several other senior NASA managers involved in mission STS-107, were discussed and criticized repeatedly in the official Columbia Accident Investigation Board report, often in the context of management actions, practices or culture that contributed to the disaster. Neither she nor anyone else was individually blamed in the report for the deaths of the seven Columbia astronauts, but she was singled out for exhibiting an attitude of avoiding inspection and assessment of actual shuttle damage. Ham's attitude, and her dismissal of dissenting points of view from engineers, was identified as part of a larger cultural problem at NASA. After the report's release, Ham was demoted and transferred out of her management position in the Space Shuttle program. Early career Born as Linda Hautzinger, Ham grew up outside Kenosha, Wisconsin. She graduated from the University of Wisconsin–Parkside in 1982 with degrees in mathematics and applied science. Soon after graduation, at 21 years of age, she applied to and was hired by NASA. Ham's first position at NASA was as a propulsion systems flight controller at the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. This was a "back room" position where she offered real-time specialist advice and support to the propulsion engineer, a flight controller in Mission Control. She was soon promoted to the position of propulsion officer in Mission Control itself, the first female to hold that position. In 1990, she married U.S. Navy pilot and NASA astronaut Kenneth Ham, with whom she had two sons, Ryan and Randy. As one of her superiors, Ron Dittemore, later commented, "she had so much talent and her intellect was so strong she could compete with the best in assessing the facts. She rose through the ranks fast at a young age because of her ability to assimilate information". Ham received her M.S. in Astronautical Engineering from Naval Postgraduate School in 1996 on a NASA fellowship and also